The House That Death Built (22 page)

Sadface turned, and even through
the mask he could sense her surprise. Rob heard the sound of someone – Aaron –
coming into the room behind him.

Sadface took a step back.

Rob rushed at her. And the only
thought in his mind was that he would visit on her a thousand pains for every
drop of blood she had helped spill.

He would stop her. He would stop
the traps. He would save TJ, save the others, save
himself
.

His fingers reached for her.

For the first time since all this
began, he smiled.

TJ shoved the woman out of the
way. He didn't know who she was and didn't care. All he knew was that he was
getting Sue out of here. Now.

Sue resisted. She pulled back,
trailing behind him. Then they were past the other woman –

(
the one who tried to hurt Sue
tried to stab her cut her with that glass
)

– and TJ felt like this would all
end. He would get Sue out of here, they would go to the cops and find a way to
make everything right.

She thought her parents had done
this. Had they? How could something as perfect as Sue come from something as…
insane
as whoever crafted this house?

No. Not true. Can't be.

As soon as they passed the woman
who had tried to hurt Sue, she seemed to find the strength to move forward of
her own volition. She was almost
pushing
him, straining to get out just
as much as he was.

Hurry. Hurry. Get out. Get Sue
out.

He glanced down. No real reason
why, other than that they were almost to the stairs. Wouldn't it be a joke, to
get this far, this close, and then fall down the stairs and break a leg?

He wasn't going to let that
happen. He'd watch his step. So he looked down…

… in time to see the red dot on
his leg. It was thigh-high, a pinprick of light that he instantly knew was a
laser beam striking him.

What?

He heard something click. Spun to
see a five-foot section of the ceiling detach. It must have been attached by
hinges to whatever was above it, because it didn't drop straight down but
instead swung in a short arc.

It was headed straight for the
woman behind Sue.

It took less than a second for
the piece of the ceiling to reach her. Before it hit, TJ saw something shift. The
face of the length of wood shimmered. Even rows of metal sprang out from it,
snapping into place perpendicular to the ceiling piece. Thousands of them,
glinting in a way that left no doubt what they were.

The ceiling piece hit the woman.
She turned her head away, and the three-inch razors that covered the entirety
of it smashed right through the balustrade and plunged into her chest, her arms
and legs.

The side of her face. Her skull.

She didn't even scream. Just
inhaled, then stopped moving. She didn't fall, though, pinned there in midair.
She looked oddly peaceful, the razors that had killed her buried on the dark
side of her body. Only her open mouth and eyes and the blood already pooling at
her feet told TJ she was gone.

It all happened in an instant.
Too fast to be completely processed, certainly too fast to be stopped.

Just like what happened next

Another piece of ceiling fell.
This one fell in the opposite direction, not arcing inward toward the balcony
and balustrade, but outward.

It happened fast. Too fast to be
completely processed.

Certainly too fast to be stopped.

No razors snapped out. No death
on the face of the board that swung down. Just the flat plane itself.

It hit TJ. It almost felt soft,
though his clavicle shattered and his shoulder dislocated. Then any pain he
might have felt was swallowed by the sensation of flying through the air. The
board was heavy, and it catapulted him forward and up as though he weighed
nothing at all. He hit what was left of the balustrade, had an instant to see a
stone floor a good twenty feet below, then began to flip over the rail.

I'm going to die.

He jerked to a halt.

His mind didn't process what was
happening. Not at first. He was staring up at the ceiling – at the huge
chandelier that hung above the foyer. It took him a full second – an eternity
when suspended over nothing – to understand what had happened.

Sue.

She had caught him on the edge of
the rail. The perfect moment where backward turned into down. She had been
wrecked by the night, by whatever was going on, but she had managed to come out
of himself in order to catch him. To save him.

He heard something below. Turned
his head enough to see the same huge dogs he had seen earlier in the hall
below. Looking up. Just looking.

Waiting for dinner to drop from
the sky.

He looked back at Susan. Smiled
at her. The thought that they were going to have to find a way past the beasts
below was pushed out of his mind by simple gratitude.

"Thanks," he breathed.

Then she let go. And
pushed
him.

Rob moved so fast it was less a
run and more a controlled fall. Aaron watched him stumble/run forward, toward
Sadface. She had a knife out, clutched in her hand as though she had been
waiting for something just like this –

(
what if she has what if she
was waiting and this is what she wants
)

– and the knife slashed out as
Rob ran for her. He sidestepped it. Knocked it away. It flew under one of the
theater seats with a light, almost jaunty clatter.

Rob plowed into Sadface. They
both hit the huge TV, but the glass screen was strong and just bounced them
back into the room with not a crack marring its surface. Rob and Sadface went
down in a heap, Rob managing to twist so he ended up on top.

"Son of a
bitch
!"
he roared, somehow managing to emphasize the last word so it left no doubt who
the "bitch" was.

Sadface wasn't done. Another
knife appeared in her hand. She swiped with it, and Rob lunged back; barely
missed having his throat cut.

He bounced back against the TV
again, and by the time he managed to find his balance, Sadface was on her feet.
Knife held out. Mask bright in the reflected light of the TV, a glowing menace.

Rob growled, and took a step
toward Sadface.

Aaron jumped into the fray.

He hit Sadface from behind,
plowing into her hips and sending her knees buckling forward. Rob kicked at the
same time, his big foot landing square in Sadface's chest. She didn't make any
sound of pain, no indicator other than a single, sharp exhalation as the air
exploded from her lungs.

But no cry. No whimper.

Just silence.

Sadface's arms wheeled as she
tried to keep her balance. Aaron was still moving forward, inertia driving him
a few more inches into and through the line of her legs. Her knees buckled
further. Rob kicked again, and this time she went down.

Rob launched himself at her,
catching her knife hand as it continued to make huge circles in the air. He
jumped on her as she pitched back, falling over Aaron's form, which was still
clenched around her upper thighs.

They hit the floor in a heap, Rob
on top and Aaron on the bottom with Sadface struggling between them –

(
sadface sandwich!
)

– and then Rob pitched himself
sideways and the weight disappeared from Aaron's body as Rob dragged Sadface
off him and onto the floor.

Sadface struggled for a moment
under Rob's bulk. But he had her knife now, and jammed it under the line of her
mask, slamming the edge against her throat hard enough to draw blood.

"Kayla!" he shouted. "Kayla,
get in here."

A moment. Silence.

Aaron looked back toward the
hall, hoping to see what was stopping her from coming. Hoping to see her
running toward them.

He didn't see her. He didn't see
the hall either.

"What –" Rob began.

The door swung closed. No view of
the hall. No view of
anything
outside this room.

Didn't Rob break the door?

And it was true. He could see
where Rob had hit the door, where he had splintered the frame.

But the door still swung shut.
And when it hit the side of the frame there was a loud click and it stopped
moving and Aaron knew that, even if Rob had knocked the entire latch mechanism
out of the door, something else was now holding it closed.

Once again, they were trapped.

TJ's mind sped up. In the instant
after he fell –

(
no not fell Susan pushed me
Sue
pushed me)

– he experienced a single instant
that somehow captured an eternity. He wondered if his mother would miss him. If
she would cry.

In the next instant he wondered
what death would feel like. When he hit the stone floor below, either to die
instantly or to merely shatter his body and then be consumed by the huge dogs
waiting there. He hoped he felt nothing. Prayed for oblivion.

And then the pain came.

It wasn't the speedy, silent
nothing that he had hoped for. Instead it was lines of agony, crisscrossing his
back, the backs of his thighs and his outstretched arms. Wetness spread across
his neck –

Wetness?

He was staring at the chandelier.
But there was something wrong. Something….

It's too close.

The stone floor had been a good
thirty feet below the chandelier. But it looked like it was only twenty or so
feet above him. Maybe even a little less.

Where are the dogs?

The wet feeling spread across the
backside of his body, then the pain – already so bad it was an effort to keep
from crying out – increased tenfold as he turned his head.

No dogs.

No
nothing
.

The pain came again. Worse than
before. White-red lines of fire across his back, legs, arms.

He screamed, and as he screamed
he saw that he was, indeed, too close to the chandelier. Saw that the dogs
were, indeed, nowhere near.

He saw the
glint
.

For a moment – another
forever-time that lasted no longer than a panicked heartbeat – he couldn't
understand. Then sight turned to thought, and thought turned to comprehension.

The glint was a wire. It streaked
across from the wall at the far end of the foyer, then to him.

He turned his head. The pain
worsened, there was a sudden surge of wetness that he now understood was blood…
but he had to know. The wire went under him, then continued to the wall that
formed the bottom of the curving stairs. Disappeared into it through a hole
that was almost too small to see.

He was on a wire, suspended in
space midway between the top of the stairs and the foyer floor.

No,
many
wires. Not just a
single, nearly invisible thread, but a spider web of filaments, spun by some
enormous creature intent not on capturing insects, but much larger prey.

He had fallen into the web. It
caught him, the wire cutting deep into his body under the driving force of his
own weight.

His legs suddenly went numb from
the thighs down. At first it was a relief, the sudden disappearance of all
sensation bringing with it a corresponding absence of pain in that area. He had
fallen into the wires so hard, they had bitten so deep, that at least one of
them had severed his spine.

A new wetness spread, this time
on top of him. Warmth cascaded across his groin as he lost control of his body.
Perhaps it was fear, maybe it was just a side effect of the paralysis.

He cried out again – pain,
terror, helplessness.

He looked up.

Sue was still there. Staring down
at him. The terror that had blanketed her expression since he first saw her
hanging from the ceiling lamp in the hall was gone. Now she looked out at the
world – at him – with a strangely blank expression. Watching everything through
eyes that had somehow lost the brightness he had seen in them every day since
that day in the garage. Sloughed it off like a snakeskin grown too small.

"Help," he croaked.

He knew she wouldn't. She hadn't
just let go, hadn't lost him to a fall. She had pushed him into it.

But his lips moved again. He
couldn't help it. "Help."

She watched him for another
microscopic eternity.

Then moved away, disappearing
from view.

A new wetness joined his urine,
his blood.

TJ wept.

And waited for death to claim him
in a web spun by a black widow that wore his lover's face.